In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Joe talks about his first encounter with the uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and how he managed to make contact with them. He talks about how they came out of the jungle and spoke to him.
00:02:40.000And their first thing was, we want bananas.
00:02:43.000And so the local anthropologists that we were with, we were just there to work with the communities that we work with.
00:02:50.000And these guys came out across the beach and you see them, they're holding their bows.
00:02:55.000And those bows are six-foot bows, seven-foot arrows.
00:02:58.000And the anthropologist was saying, put down your weapons.
00:03:01.000Put down your bows before you talk to us.
00:03:04.000This does not need to be violent because their first instinct is to defend themselves.
00:03:09.000And so there's maybe 20, 30 of us, and the local guys had a couple of shotguns just in case for protection because we were not initiating contact.
00:03:18.000That's the thing I've been explaining to everybody.
00:03:19.000We were just there working in the community.
00:03:47.000And then, I mean, the courage of this guy to get in the river and go, you know, 10 feet from them and push the canoe.
00:03:55.000There was no contact, no physical contact made.
00:03:58.000But he gave them these plantains, and then you notice when they take them, it's not like, oh, yeah, let's take the plantains, we'll go back in the jungle and divvy them up.
00:05:15.000And so since like the last time I saw you, we were nailing all these successes, adding acres to the reserve, because what we're doing is trying to create this corridor, which is going to become a national park.
00:05:26.000We're trying to save this one river in the headwaters of the Amazon.
00:05:29.000And we had been on this success run, you know, from people hearing the stories, from things like this, people coming in and helping us do that.
00:05:40.000And then it started to change where we realized, okay, we're protecting so much land that the logging mafias and the narco-traffickers started pushing back.
00:06:54.000Cattle ranching accounts for 60% of Amazon deforestation.
00:06:57.000And then it's just development, roads.
00:07:00.000China has a new shipping port in Peru that they want to create, I think, a railroad over the Andes Mountains or through the Andes Mountains so they can start getting access to the Amazon for Asian markets.
00:07:12.000Is it true they carved out a giant pathway through the Amazon for a climate change conference?
00:07:18.000You know, I've been trying to figure out if that's true.
00:07:22.000But it's one of those things, like, who knows if that's real.
00:07:24.000That, and then the other one is they're like, you know, Swedish billionaire bought this much of the Amazon, and it's like, but what's his name?
00:07:31.000They keep saying that, and I'm like, I don't know.
00:07:32.000Well, let's put it into perplexity and find out if that's true.
00:07:37.000Whether or not they carved out a pathway through the Amazon for a climate change summit.
00:08:00.000You don't need to carve out a fucking pathway.
00:08:02.000But I remember seeing a video of this guy, and he was saying, like, this is where the jungle used to be, and now it's just this big road.
00:08:08.000And I was like, but again, who in charge of the climate?
00:08:11.000Unless they were going to have a climate conference and just local administrators and politicians said, well, we better get ready and clear this area.
00:08:19.000And like, maybe it wasn't intentional.
00:09:11.000Credentials, but lacks local and conservationists, but some local and locals and conservationists are outraged at the environmental impact.
00:09:51.000There's never been a time in history, though, before where we're looking at, is there going to be ecological collapse?
00:09:57.000The thing that I'm talking about with where they've cut 20% of the Amazon, scientists are warning that if we cut too much of the Amazon, that moisture cycle, I think the thing was that 20 trillion liters of water every day are pumped into the air from the Amazon, and that becomes the cloud system that rains back down and creates the Amazon rainforest.
00:10:15.000If you cut too much of that, you break the cycle.
00:10:18.000And that forest has been growing for something like 55 million years.
00:10:24.000And so we are the generation that's going to decide, do we find a sustainable way to keep the Amazon rainforest functioning, or are we going to break that cycle?
00:10:34.000And once we lose it, it's not going to come back.
00:10:47.000It's like we have the ability to organize incredible.
00:10:50.000I mean, if you can organize an airport, you can figure out a way to protect a forest.
00:10:54.000But the fact that it's in numerous Latin American countries, Brazil wants to develop.
00:10:58.000In Peru, you have the illegal gold miners coming in.
00:11:01.000And now you have the pressure from the Asian markets.
00:11:04.000And, you know, we found that if you just, I mean, that's what we've been doing over the last 20 years is going to these gold miners and loggers and going, how much do you make?
00:11:28.000It's just crazy that it takes a person like you and your organization to put some sort of a dent in this.
00:11:36.000This isn't some sort of a gigantic global effort, that there's not a lot of people that are recognizing this issue and saying, hey, this is a huge problem if this goes away.
00:11:48.000I think, though, that there I see in the world that I exist in, I see that all over the world there's people doing conservation projects and that we are at this point where there's enough happening where, I mean, you had E.O. Wilson advocating for the half-earth policy where it's, you know, at least half of the earth has to remain ecosystems.
00:12:06.000If you break too much down, if you ruin our ocean fisheries, if you cut the rainforests in the forest, you're going to ruin the weather.
00:12:12.000The stuff that comes standard with life on earth is going to be depleted.
00:12:17.000And so I think, you know, you see tiger numbers going up in India.
00:12:20.000You see that there's actually been an increase in forest cover globally, but in some of the most important areas, like the Amazon, it's just wild.
00:12:30.000And I mean, that's what we're doing is, you know, the guy JJ that I work with, who's local, he's been trying to, he's been saying this for years.
00:12:38.000I mean, since we saw each other, he got, which I don't know how this happened.
00:12:41.000I don't know how some of this stuff happens, but we got an email one day from Time, and they were like, we're selecting our, you know, 100 climate leaders of 2024.
00:13:06.000And it was because he saw his forest get destroyed and because he saw the fish vanish from the rivers as nets came in.
00:13:12.000And then as chainsaws came to the region, he saw the trees go down.
00:13:16.000He went, we got to protect the next river.
00:13:19.000And so he's the one that, you know, when I went down there at 18 years old, he's the one that was like, look, you got to help me protect this.
00:13:25.000And of course, at 18 years old, I was like, how?
00:13:31.000And then when we started seeing the smoke on the horizon and we started hearing the chainsaws and it got more urgent, I started telling these stories and then the Anaconda stories and everything else, the first book that I wrote.
00:13:42.000And little by little, Jane Goodall, people helped along the way.
00:13:49.000Well, I'm happy to get the word out because I mean, it's kind of insane that it's happening.
00:13:56.000But it's also that place is such a magical place.
00:14:00.000And it has such an insane history that we're just starting to understand the history of the people that live there.
00:14:07.000I mean, through the use of LIDAR, they're just starting to understand that the entire place was massively populated and that a lot of the plants that exist in the Amazon are actually agriculture plants that went, you know, went rogue when the people were depopulated because people brought in smallpox.
00:14:59.000But that these plants that they grew for agriculture were the ones that had, you know, once people stopped tending them and taking care of them, they overwhelmed the rest of the forest.
00:15:11.000Yeah, a friend sent me a clip, and I think you were talking to Tom Segura, and you went, you know, and the crazy thing about the Amazon, and you went, it's largely man-made.
00:15:20.000And I was like, threw something, and I was like, no, let's find out why we said that.
00:15:25.000Let's pull that up, run that into perplexity and see what articles we get.
00:15:30.000Because what they're saying is that these plants, the number, I believe, if I'm not misstating, the numbers that they exist in are not natural.
00:15:41.000But that's only around these ancient sites.
00:15:44.000And so I went and did a deep dive into this, and the sites that they've studied are along the watersheds.
00:15:49.000And so in the Amazon, you have terra firma, which is sort of dry forest, and then it dips into the river basin and you have floodplain.
00:15:56.000Most of these cities existed on floodplains.
00:15:58.000And so where the scientists are able to go is up the rivers, and they go to the edges of these floodplains where they find ancient human settlements.
00:16:04.000And that's where you find terrapreda soil, which is human-engineered.
00:16:07.000And that's where you find there'll be like a higher incidence of certain trees or certain plants.
00:16:13.000And so, like bananas, for example, or sometimes they'll plant a higher amount of Brazil nut trees.
00:16:19.000Here it is, our sponsor, Perplexity, which is always accurate.
00:16:22.000Estimates suggest that roughly 10 to 15 percent of the Amazon standing forest shows clear signs of being man-made, or strongly shaped by long-term indigenous management, not planted as uniform tree farms, but modified over thousands of years.
00:16:36.000Much of the Amazon that looks wild has been influenced by pre-Columbian indigenous agroforestry, soil enrichment, Amazon dark earths, that's terraprata, and species selection rather than being a purely untouched wilderness.
00:16:51.000These systems differ from modern plantations.
00:16:54.000They are diverse, semi-natural forests, enriched with useful trees and crops rather than rows of single commercial species.
00:17:02.000So the idea of the terraprata was that a lot of the Amazon soil is not good for agriculture.
00:18:25.000When it separated from Africa, the Congo and the Amazon used to be joined in some sort of proto-Congo system.
00:18:33.000And then when they separated, the Amazon South America hit up against the Nazca Plate, the Andes Mountains shot up, and then the salinated water drained out.
00:18:42.000And that's why we still have inland freshwater stingrays, manatees, pink river dolphins.
00:19:38.000But the thing that This theory about the Amazon is even human engineered is wrong.
00:19:45.000Because when you look at the size of the Amazon, you look at that 2.7 million miles, it's that they've said that what they're not getting is that in the areas that these people have been studying with LIDAR and through this anthropological digging, they're saying it's more than we thought.
00:20:02.000There's certainly more human settlements than we previously thought.
00:20:05.000There maybe were a few million people there before Pizarro and the explorers came.
00:20:12.000But when you know, what you don't realize is that between the rivers, between each river, which is the majority of the Amazon, is this terra firma giant jungle with hundreds of miles between the rivers, nobody's been there.
00:20:24.000And so I just was reading a scientific paper.
00:20:26.000It was saying they went out and sampled those areas and it showed absolutely no sign of human engineering.
00:20:34.000In terms of the growth of the plants, but did they do LIDAR to see if there's previous structures?
00:20:38.000Well, the good thing with the LIDAR is that they fly over.
00:20:40.000And so the LIDAR confirmed that over those human areas, like you get like a river confluence where two rivers are coming together, there'll be a human settlement there.
00:20:48.000And in those areas, they find that the terra praeta, they'll find that the plants occur in different abundance and diversity than in the other places.
00:20:55.000But that this message that the Amazon itself was engineered by ancient humans or prehistoric humans is not actually accurate.
00:21:06.000I think they're saying it because people build their careers on, you know, if you come out and say, I have a new theory about how this formed, it gets attention.
00:21:06.000Did they make it a little bit more difficult?
00:21:15.000There's even a, and nothing against, what's his name?
00:21:48.000And then it went, yeah, but these theories discount the fact that 95% of the Amazon rainforest has not been surveyed in this way.
00:21:54.000And most of it shows that these are just wild ecosystems that have been growing since the dawn of time for the last 55, 30 million years.
00:22:02.000And it's just been speciating and growing and evolving on its own.
00:22:06.000And it's only in these tiny areas that humans have done this sort of engineering.
00:22:11.000Where there were tribes, the first one to come down the Amazon, he mentioned that there were tribes that had sectioned off parts of the river and they were growing the giant river turtles.
00:22:21.000And that was their prime source of protein.
00:22:22.000So they figured out how to get protein.
00:25:30.000And so we're working, these guys are, you know, working with us as rangers and we're building this develop, developing this relationship with the local communities of saying, how do you do you want to continue living this way?
00:25:40.000Do you want your kids to live this way?
00:25:42.000And the answer usually is yes, but with better health and education.
00:25:47.000So we want to say, yes, but that's interesting.
00:25:52.000They want to continue that way of life because it's the only thing they've known.
00:25:55.000I mean, have any of these people ever gone to like any of these other cities that are fairly close or that they could reach and seen what that life is like?
00:26:05.000Yeah, we brought one of the communities.
00:26:07.000They were having trouble with the Peruvian government getting recognized as an indigenous community.
00:26:12.000And they were having this trouble for 15 years.
00:26:15.000And we used, you know, now we have lawyers and people and we have an office and all this stuff in Peru.
00:26:19.000And so we went and sat down with them.
00:26:21.000We said, okay, why are you having this trouble?
00:26:23.000I mean, you clearly are an indigenous community.
00:26:38.000I mean, these are people that are like putting their bows and arrows and guns down and walking into an office and sitting there in the air conditioning.
00:26:44.000And they're like, next, and they're like, sit.
00:26:45.000And they're like, do you have form like I-227B?
00:27:19.000Like, is there any like political influence by the whatever it is, miners, ranchers, anyone who tries to stop that from happening, bribe people to try to take over the land of these people?
00:27:32.000I mean, the Amazon is a war zone of influence.
00:27:35.000And so you have, I mean, the miners, if anybody tries to protest the gold mining, they kill you.
00:27:41.000So one of the lawyers that I was working with, his father had come out and said, look, as a local Peruvian person in the jungle, I want this to stop.
00:27:49.000They can't, they're destroying, there's a, Jamie, there's a photo in the folder that says, I think it says sandstorm or something, but it's just, it's not even, again, deserts are actually ecosystems.
00:29:26.000And so there's massive individual suffering for millions of animals on a single tree.
00:29:31.000And so then when you have these fires where they cut the forest and just burn everything, this, I mean, those trees would have been filled with monkeys and birds and the snakes, you know, they get scared.
00:29:43.000They burrow deeper into their hole and then it burns.
00:29:59.000And I mean, this is what it's supposed to look like.
00:30:00.000It's supposed to be this lush, verdant, ancient rainforest filled with wildlife.
00:30:06.000I mean, the cacophony of sound when you're going to sleep in your tent at night and you're out in a place like that, it's just this throbbing, pulsing symphony.
00:30:16.000The magic of that place, of real wilderness, is wild.
00:30:20.000I mean, that particular shot was, we had to go for days to reach that spot, you know, all day on the river camp, all day on the river camp.
00:30:28.000You know, you're going up rapids, you're going up the waterfalls to get to these places that nobody can go.
00:30:33.000And there's an example of, it's, that was specifically a location where they've studied and they've found that there's never been a human settlement there.
00:30:41.000It's just a corner of the Amazon ever.
00:30:43.000Have they done LiDAR in these areas where they say that people live?
00:31:08.000I just think that right now the problem is that it's getting grossly overstated how much of the Amazon, if you take it as a football field and you go, man, I thought it was only in this much of the football field, you know, in a few inches of it.
00:31:20.000And then you find out there's actually 10 feet of the football field that was, there's still the rest of the football field is still wild.
00:32:11.000Like, imagine if you were looking for a coyote and you had to look through the entire, like there was a thousand coyotes in the center of the United States.
00:32:19.000And you started in Pennsylvania and you were hiking your way.
00:32:22.000Like, I don't see any fucking coyotes.
00:32:25.000But there's a thousand of them that are in North Dakota.
00:33:05.000And you have to talk to the people that actually know.
00:33:07.000Well, this guy was trying to do that, but there was this one scene of exasperation where he was like sitting down saying, did I stake my entire reputation on horse shit?
00:33:34.000Which is like he communicates that way.
00:33:36.000Like when he wants to eat, he comes up to me and he huffs.
00:33:43.000No, but I think that's that's the truth is that it's it's people think it's like you can just go find this stuff and it's that the the secrets in this world are hidden for a reason.
00:33:54.000And even if there is a tribe that knows about the giant ground sloths, they're not going to tell us.
00:35:00.000Estimates typically say that about 25% of modern pharmaceutical drugs are derived from rainforest plants.
00:35:09.000And many of those known examples come from the Amazon, but there's no precise peer-reviewed percentage just for the Amazon alone.
00:35:18.000Most popular figures, you see, like 25% of medicines come from the Amazon, actually refer to all tropical rainforests, not specifically the Amazon.
00:35:25.000But the thing is, like, how much of the Amazon has not been explored and how many potential pharmaceutical drugs or, you know, here's that's the term, right?
00:37:18.000Well, I got MRSA years ago at, I had dengue and I had gone to a clinic in the city, which MRSA usually lives in the hospitals in the human areas.
00:37:29.000Right, because it's a medication-resistant staph infection.
00:37:45.000So chances are that's where it doesn't exist.
00:37:47.000And that's the thing you see in the wild jungle, you don't have malaria, you don't have rabies, you don't have dengue because the human population is so low that it doesn't spread.
00:37:56.000A mosquito bites you here, the next person that's going to bite is me or Jamie.
00:38:02.000Mosquito bites me in the city, and then I go out into the rainforest.
00:38:08.000And so it's not going to spread like that.
00:38:10.000Whereas if we have a town of loggers, that's why when you go to these logging and mining camps, the diseases, they're just, I mean, there's this thing called this type of flea called a peaky that burrows into your feet and lays eggs.
00:38:24.000There's malaria, dengue, what's the bird zyka virus?
00:38:28.000There's all these crazy things, but we don't have that out in the jungle because, I mean, the ecosystem, the frogs eat most of the mosquito larvae.
00:38:39.000The mosquito larvae, like bromeliad cups or puddles.
00:38:42.000Well, bromeliad cups and puddles are filled with tadpoles.
00:38:46.000And then, of course, there's turtles in the puddles eating the tadpoles, and then there's other things eating the turtles.
00:39:02.000And so that's how nature, they say, you know, mangrove forests will stop tsunamis from destroying a town because they'll stop the rush of the water.
00:39:11.000Well, forests will keep you safe by not only producing rainfall that'll come down on your crops, but also making sure that the ecosystem's not out of balance so you're not covered in mosquitoes and parasites.
00:39:21.000When I lived in LA, I moved into a house in Encino that I was renting, and no one had lived there in quite a while, and they had left the water in the pool.
00:39:31.000And when I was going out to look at the pool, the pool was completely green, and there was things swimming in it.
00:40:38.000And I'd seen one guy get stung by a stingray, and he had nerve damage, a systemic infection up his leg and his whole body, and he didn't walk for months.
00:42:17.000That pack there, they went to two different trees and they removed compounds from the tree.
00:42:22.000One was the bark and one was the fiber and they put it into a leaf pack and they cook it on a pan and they heat it and it makes this plant poultice and they put this boiling hot piece of plant material.
00:42:33.000It's like a fish cake and they put it against the wound and even that burned but it felt better than the venom and it starts to suck out the venom.
00:42:42.000And so when they took it off my foot after like, this is them getting the getting the plant material, they know the medicines and that's been handed down through the generations.
00:42:51.000So they're just shaving it off with a knife.
00:42:53.000Yes, you see this few different colors.
00:42:54.000They're going to make a cake of all this stuff.
00:43:41.000This was at night where I was like, okay, the pain had subsided, but I didn't get nerve damage and I didn't get a huge infection because they had this indigenous plant medicine to save me.
00:44:15.000I mean, it must have been a small one or something, but it just right up through the through the arch of my foot.
00:44:21.000And what's funny is that just I would never walk barefoot ever.
00:44:24.000Well, I walk barefoot all the time, but but but just days before, not days before that, about a month before that, I'd fallen off of something like a 50 or 60 foot cliff and just rolled down and bruised ribs and gotten all banged up.
00:44:36.000I'd climbed up this cliff thinking I could, I was like, oh, I see this root up there.
00:45:23.000And if you went to the hospital, I did not go to the hospital.
00:45:26.000But if you did go to the hospital, I mean, the guy that went to the hospital didn't walk for two months, had the necrosis, and had a huge infection that he had to go get treatments for.
00:45:37.000I mean, he went back to his home country and had to continue being treated for months.
00:45:42.000And him, too, watching someone roll back and forth in that type of agonizing pain, like brave heart pain, like when they're just like opening him up.
00:45:51.000I mean, I just didn't know there was pain like that.
00:45:53.000You know, I mean, I've ripped open every part of my body and this was, it's from the inside and it's pulsating.
00:46:00.000And you just go, the other thing is, you go, how much, how much of my year did I just miss?
00:46:05.000You know, am I going to, it's like the one time I almost chopped my knee.
00:46:09.000I almost cut the tendon that holds your kneecap on.
00:46:11.000And I was just like, man, did I just take myself out of the game for a year?
00:46:29.000Their father taught them and their mother taught them and their grandparents know.
00:46:34.000And so that's the thing with knowledge, indigenous knowledge all over the world.
00:46:39.000If you listen to authors like Wade Davis, who writes a lot about indigenous wisdom, you know, this is stuff that's been one at a time gleaned from nature.
00:46:47.000And, you know, you, you know, better than most.
00:47:09.000The prevailing thing is that science and sort of like the statistics of trial and error are incomprehensible given 40,000 plant species and all the different flowering and orchids and trees.
00:47:22.000And so it would take millennia if you did trial and error.
00:47:27.000And the cost of human life to any civilization would make it too high.
00:47:30.000And so when they say that the gods gave us ayahuasca, that's the prevailing best thing we got, is that it's a link between our world and the spirit world that the jungle gave us.
00:48:00.000Is there a feeling that you get where you get an understanding of combining two things because the jungle's actually got a way of communicating with you that's a non-verbal way?
00:48:10.000I think the jungle, I mean, I view it as almost a, you know, it's like it's godlike.
00:48:15.000It's almost like a giant, complex, sentient being.
00:48:19.000And so if you listen to, if you watch, you know, if you walk the jungle with JJ, an indigenous tracker, he'll tell you, you listen to the birds, they'll tell you how fast you're allowed to walk.
00:48:30.000And what he means is you're walking through the forest on a sunny day, it's the afternoon, and everybody's chirping and making tons of noise.
00:48:36.000And all of a sudden, everything goes quiet.
00:48:39.000And then you got to figure out, you know, is that because there's a weather system coming in and we're about to be in a thunderstorm?
00:48:44.000Or is there a jaguar right over there and everything around me knows?
00:48:48.000And it's like the birds are the messengers of the forest.
00:48:51.000And so even that, you start to become attuned to the frequency of the forest.
00:48:55.000And I notice when I bring people in that, you know, I've never been in the wild before, they walk loud, they're talking the whole time.
00:49:02.000They're not paying attention to that sort of holistic view of where you are.
00:49:07.000You know, modern civilized life has made us so clunky when it comes to the woods.
00:49:13.000You know, just when I take people in the woods, if people have never hunted before, they're stepping on branches, snap, snap, kicking rocks over, talking loud.
00:49:23.000My favorite is walking in front of you, and then when the stick snaps back, like having the sensitivity to like, they don't catch it.
00:49:34.000You know, it's like if you've never been, you don't understand.
00:49:37.000But I mean, I would imagine it's that times a million in the Amazon.
00:49:41.000And then all the different things that are communicating.
00:49:44.000One of the things that they found out with monkeys is that monkeys have some sort of a language where they can say a sound that means an eagle is there.
00:50:14.000It's African vervet monkeys that I've read about that they have different calls, different words for land predator, lion, eagle, and they can communicate these things.
00:51:53.000And then she was like, well, if you let because I could have grabbed her like, you know, like animal control, like grabbed her by the neck.
00:52:28.000And that's one of those stories where if it wasn't on video, and I said, I spoke to a spider monkey and she responded, people go, yeah, bullshit.
00:54:50.000And I, but, and I see no, I see no conflict between, you know, we're trying to protect the ecosystem and save the monkeys.
00:54:57.000And I love the monkeys and I've rescued a lot of them personally.
00:55:00.000But again, when you're when you're in Rome, you know, if you don't eat with them, they go, that gringo, you know, they think that they're, yeah.
00:55:07.000Whereas they're like, oh, you're one of us.
00:56:39.000Yeah, I mean if you if you sear it first and then you I mean it's kind of if you sear it first yeah right because like just boiled chicken to me just like you think of white like just eating it.
00:56:50.000Yeah so here he's just eating yeah see like they're like having a really good time.
00:56:54.000Yeah initially he was like I'm not doing that and then once they started doing it was like okay he said it's it tasted like smoked turkey.
00:57:04.000Yeah it is it's interesting because if you live there like my friend David Cho, he was in Africa and he hunted with the Hadza and they eat baboons.
00:57:16.000And he said one of the craziest things is when you hit the baboon with an arrow, they grab it like a person.
00:57:31.000And, you know, it's like you were saying also, they don't have a sense of wildlife conservation.
00:57:37.000It's not like, hey, we have an accurate assessment of how many baboons are here or how many deer are here or dikers or whatever the animal is that they're hunting.
00:57:46.000They just eat whatever they can and sometimes they eat them almost to extinction and then they have to move on to baboons.
00:57:51.000And baboons were like the only thing that was left.
00:57:53.000And then there's also like other people have encroached and settlements and, you know.
00:57:58.000That's the way my guys, because we have a lot of wildlife in our region.
00:58:02.000And people from other regions will come as laggers and they'll go, oh my God, my dad told me that it used to be like this where we were.
00:58:09.000And now we have people from other watersheds in the Amazon, like, you know, 150 miles away coming to us and they're going, can you guys bring jungle keepers over?
00:58:17.000And they don't understand, you know, we're killing ourselves just to protect this river.
00:58:20.000And they're going, can you do this where we are?
00:58:22.000They're like, we have no more food because they don't have any regulation on this.
00:58:26.000And so what we're doing with the tribes in our area is just teaching this basic thing of like, you know, don't hunt, you know, at these times of year when they're having their babies.
00:59:10.000And it was, where he is is like something, it was like Cormac McCarthy's nightmare.
00:59:14.000If Cormac McCarthy was still alive, I would show him the, I went to a part of the Amazon that really no one goes to, up this horrible river.
00:59:24.000And there were recently contacted, uncontacted people, just this tribe that had just come out of the forest and they still had their bows.
00:59:34.000Me and JJ went for like a three-week expedition, plane to plane to plane to three days on a boat to two days on a boat to finally reaching this last settlement.
00:59:43.000And the missionaries had pulled this tribe out of the forest.
01:00:47.000But I mean, these people think they're with their bows and arrows and there's no more animals to hunt and no one's going to give them money.
01:00:54.000And they live at the edge of the world.
01:00:55.000And they're probably tiny because they don't have any protein.
01:01:27.000Actually, they did say, we were talking to one logger, and he said, a few years ago, he goes, we saw some rafts coming downriver, and then they stopped at this beach upriver and they made camp.
01:01:39.000And he's like, so we all talked about it.
01:01:41.000And we said, well, we have a feeling they're organ harvesters.
01:01:44.000And they were scared of these incomers, right?
01:01:48.000So the organ harvesters visit the Amazon?
01:01:57.000don't know that must be a thing that gets i don't know but But the dude I was sitting with told me, he goes, you know, we got real scared sitting around the campfire.
01:02:37.000And the next book I write, I'm going to have to do a deep dive into this one because it was just, it was heavy.
01:02:44.000And we also, we knew we, for the first time, you know, when you're in the jungle, we're like, we're safe.
01:02:48.000This place, it was like people are looking at you and they're like, that's a jacket and a watch, you know, like a camera and a tent and a pack raft.
01:02:55.000They're like, you, like, if we killed him, we'd get all kinds of stuff.
01:02:58.000They're looking at you like, man, that's a, that's a lot of opportunity.
01:03:01.000And you could just see them being like, well, let's separate him from the herd.
01:03:30.000And so like the communities that I've worked with in my region of the Amazon, they're all, you know, you show, I've showed up on a pack raft and been like, hey, and they're like, where did you come from?
01:03:40.000And I'm like, I'm just this foreigner who does work here.
01:03:43.000And I talk to them and they're like, oh, camp here.
01:04:39.000And these poor people are sitting there and you could see them like they were all like breastfeeding their babies and like trying to eat rats.
01:04:46.000And it was just, we stayed there for one night and we didn't sleep.
01:04:51.000We were just in our tent, just awake all night.
01:04:53.000And then the next day we got in the boat and we kept going further upriver and we finally made it into the into past the edge of human civilization into into just uncharted jungle.
01:09:20.000And so this is now what's happening on this river, where it's because it's the last wilderness, they're coming.
01:09:26.000And so we're trying to, you know, we're relying on the Peruvian authorities to stop this from happening so that we can create this park before it's too late because they're also blazing roads.
01:10:06.000Well, the thing is, the police intercept off to one of the people that they arrested on the phone, it said, if you see JJ or that shithead gringo that flies the drone, they said, if you kill them, we'll reward you.
01:10:19.000So they found this message on WhatsApp.
01:10:21.000They showed it to us and they were like, you guys have a hit on you.
01:10:25.000And then a few days later, JJ was supposed to get in the car at the side of, you know, you take the boat downriver to the car and he was supposed to get in the car and go back to the town.
01:10:35.000He actually came downriver in the boat and they went, I forgot, I forgot that I wanted to finish up something at the station.
01:14:16.000And I mean, we have different ranger stations along the river.
01:14:18.000And if we make this into a park, like Teddy Roosevelt, no, John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt on a three-day camping trip and showed him Yosemite and like Sequoia and all this stuff.
01:14:28.000And he was like, we got to protect this.
01:16:04.000Peru, I think, has become, if not on the same level as Colombia, I think they might have surpassed Colombia in terms of cocaine production.
01:16:13.000They're not doing great with that right now.
01:16:15.000And so we're at this very, very crucial juncture there.
01:16:19.000But, you know, it's funny because in doing all this, you know, with even with the book coming out, and I've been talking to people, and people go, well, you have narcos now.
01:16:27.000They're like, so you're going to fail.
01:16:29.000And it's like, man, you're not even the one on the ground.
01:17:45.000And so it's 3 a.m. and we get in this boat and we're going upriver and there's lightning flashing and there's rain falling and I'm looking with the flashlight and I'm navigating by the crocodile eyes because we don't know where the edges of the river are because they shine.
01:17:59.000And so we have footage of this and we arrive at the ranger station and sure enough, this tree had fallen, crushed the roof, all the beams and all the scaffolding under the roof and fallen on this woman's face while she was in bed.
01:18:13.000And so she was crushed under this and she couldn't even scream because it was raining so loud.
01:18:17.000And so we get there and I stick my hand into the rubble and I hold her hand and I'm like, are you okay?
01:18:24.000And she was like, hey, Paul, she's like, I have no idea.
01:18:27.000And she was amazingly like, like, buoyant.
01:18:30.000She was like, I have no idea if I'm okay.
01:19:28.000I remember sitting in school and being like, why did like you read about like Roosevelt and Jane Goodall and like these people had these amazingly adventurous lives.
01:19:37.000And I was sitting in school getting detention after detention and getting yelled at and being like, can I go to the bathroom?
01:19:43.000And I was like, why do they get to do that?
01:20:23.000And again, you know, that whole thing of what's that thing they say, like a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace.
01:20:29.000And it's like the beauty of that, you know, you drink from the river and then you sweat it out and you watch your sweat join the steam and rain back down onto the jungle.
01:20:38.000You are connected to your environment.
01:20:40.000And every single day, you don't know what's going to happen.
01:20:43.000You know, I opened, there was one day where I was like, okay, I'm going to stay on the station.
01:24:01.000No, It's a type of large rodent because David Tell used to have a TV show called Insomniac, and he went out at night one time with them in Louisiana and they're hunting these things that they're an invasive rodent, a giant rodent.
01:24:17.000And it was like Dave would do his shows and then after it was a Comedy Central show.
01:24:23.000And then he would find things to do in the town because he can't sleep because he's up all night.
01:24:27.000And so he went out with these people that were, God, I can't remember what the animal was, but it's a large invasive rodent that exists in the South.
01:27:11.000And you wait for a feature in the river, like a rock or a place where the water's rushing, and you smack it against because they like that falling, falling fruit or falling seeds.
01:27:20.000And when they hit that, I'm talking about like a four-inch hook.
01:27:23.000When they hit that hook, this is the thing because you're doing this for you doing it for an hour and you're like, all right, there's no Paco in here.
01:27:30.000When they do hit it, they'll pull you right out of the boat.
01:28:38.000But I mean, that Paco was in the middle of the Amazon at night, just jumping around, enjoying itself, and it just jumped in the wrong boat.
01:33:10.000He goes, don't leave me alone in the dark.
01:33:12.000And I went, God, I said, all right, I'll do it.
01:33:15.000And we drank right next to each other.
01:33:18.000And the guy's smoking his pipe and, you know, he has the feathers on and he's singing to us and you're drinking and you're going deeper and deeper into the hole.
01:34:12.000And he said, Lex was there to do some real work.
01:34:16.000And so what's interesting is that we both reached this sort of, we both reached the pinnacle of what was happening at the same time where I felt myself about, I felt it coming.
01:34:27.000I was like, oh no, I'm going to throw up.
01:34:56.000And then he came and he started with the, you know, shaking the leaves and singing louder and really cultivating, making sure we gave everything that we purged all of it.
01:35:04.000And then he brought the crescendo down.
01:35:07.000And then he calmed and then he began singing.
01:35:09.000And then we settled back into the symphonic throb of the night.
01:35:14.000And then the trip went on for some time, but it was interesting that things heightened at that moment and that we went through it together.
01:35:29.000You know, and then and then, you know, it was very interesting watching Lex go through his journey because he, by the end of it, he just got happier and happier.
01:36:04.000He's saying the other things, Amarumayo, and he's saying shiwa wako, and he's talking about the, so he's doing this and shaking his thing, and you hear the frogs throbbing, and it's all moving through your skin.
01:36:15.000And so I, yeah, I tapped out after a while, and Lex kept going.
01:38:41.000He's training some of the best guys alive.
01:38:43.000So he's running a camp down in Dagestan.
01:38:46.000Because he's kind of like, so did he, it seemed like, at least I don't like, I wasn't really following his career, but it seemed like he came in like an assassin, did some big stuff.
01:40:37.000The problem is he was a very small guy, and so a lot of people disregard the smaller guys in that conversation.
01:40:45.000But skill-wise, in terms of the expression of mixed martial arts excellence, I put Mighty Mouse in his prime right up there with everybody.
01:40:54.000Do you think that now your arms are significantly bigger than mine?
01:40:58.000And I feel like the guys who are good at striking have smaller arms.
01:41:53.000I do a lot of chin-ups and dips, and sometimes I do it with a vest, you know.
01:41:57.000And I do, you know, but with kettlebells, like the heavy, occasionally I'll throw around a 90-pound kettlebell, but the heaviest I really train with is 70.
01:48:48.000And I learned technique, which is the most important thing, like perfect technique.
01:48:54.000And so when it was funny, it was because it came about because of John Donaher.
01:49:00.000I had a conversation with John Donagher, who's George's Jiu-Jitsu coach, who's maybe the greatest martial arts coach in the world, maybe of all time.
01:49:08.000Really, legitimately, like a brilliant man.
01:49:11.000He was a philosophy major from Columbia who got, I think he was a professor for a bit, but then he got obsessed with jiu-jitsu and was just teaching jiu-jitsu and training jiu-jitsu and sleeping on the mats.
01:56:13.000The last time I came, I think he had been in there the night before, and I was like, ah, I would have been, that would have been a trip to meet him.
02:00:21.000We know short-faced bear, a bunch of different animals that they find their bones in Alaska, and they know that they probably made their way down through North America.
02:00:30.000It just stands, it just makes logical sense that if you have a variety of different megafauna, that probably one of those primates or a bunch of those primates lived in the Pacific Northwest, which is the area where they would be, right?
02:00:45.000And then you have incredibly dense forest, right?
02:00:48.000So Jane Goodall won't rule out the existence of...
02:02:33.000Well, you know, you got to realize this is a lady that lived with primates in an inaccessible area where there's very few human beings and she had these interactions with them.
02:02:44.000I don't agree with her, but I think that it existed at one point in time.
02:02:48.000One of the other reasons why I think it exists is that different Native American tribes put this into perplexity.
02:02:55.000How many different Native American terms were there for a hairy wild man or Bigfoot?
02:04:47.000Because you go, Jane Goodall, I went to a talk when I was like 22, something, and I was just writing chapters of my first book, Mother of God, which didn't even have a name yet.
02:04:58.000And I had chapters in a manila envelope, and I went to a talk that Goodall was giving.
02:05:04.000And I mean, I'd been read stories and seen the black and white pictures.
02:05:07.000So this is like, you know, like Einstein, the Abe Lincoln, Jane Goodall, like a living historical figure.
02:05:13.000And so now she's talking in front of me.
02:05:14.000And I had brought these chapters and I wanted to ask her because I'd already sent the chapters to publishers.
02:05:19.000And they'd all been like, kid, none of this is true.
02:05:22.000You know, no way did you jump on a giant anaconda.
02:05:41.00048 hours later, her staff gets in touch and they go, Jane actually read what you gave her, loved it, and said, finish the book, get a publisher, and I will write you an endorsement.
02:06:02.000And what's really great is that earlier this year, I emailed her, and it was because this book was coming out.
02:06:08.000And I, you know, I said it would be amazing to have, I mean, I said, at this point, no one's, you know, the conservation, the voice of Mother Earth.
02:06:18.000And she just, you know, she was just, she just said, you know, just keep protecting the Amazon.
02:08:25.000But I do think, not Bigfoot, but I do think that it's entirely possible that there is a small, hairy, primate-like, human-like primate that exists still.
02:08:40.000That's like the Hobbit people from the island of Flores.
02:08:43.000You know, there's the thing called the Orang Pandek.
02:08:48.000The Aurang Pandek, I think Indonesia, perhaps Vietnam, there's a bunch of places that have this creature that gets sighted on multiple occasions.
02:09:23.000It was a very small-like hobbit-like creature that was a type of primate that was bipedal, that was like a little tiny, hairy human being that lived at least on the island of Flores, but most likely lived in many other places as well.
02:09:43.000And there's a possibility that it still exists.
02:09:50.000It's like some actual anthropologists that believe that this thing might still be alive because you're dealing with incredibly small populations.
02:09:58.000But are those, I mean, are those islands so small that no, like, unlike the Amazon, but like, how could there be a population?
02:10:29.000I mean, let's pretend that you saw a wolverine in the Montana woods, like dense Montana woods, and it's 100 yards away.
02:10:39.000You see it briefly for a second, get your phone.
02:10:41.000You're not going to, you might have seen it.
02:10:43.000You might have seen it traveling between the trees.
02:10:45.000But, like, how are you going to get it off your phone?
02:10:47.000You're going to have to, unless you have a Samsung, where you have a really good Zoom, you're not going to be able to zoom in enough.
02:10:52.000You know, like, you'd have to have a few phones that are good.
02:10:55.000Yeah, you're not going to get good footage, but we know that wolverines are real.
02:10:59.000But finding a wolverine in the woods, I've talked to, God, I've talked to hundreds of men who spend a giant portion of their life in the woods, and only a few have seen wolverines.
02:11:19.000But I've probably been around a hundred of them and not known it.
02:11:23.000You know, that's the reaction we got with the tribes: if you look at uncontacted tribes, I mean, my whole life, you look at photos of uncontacted tribes, it was like blurry, crappy, because who was out there?
02:12:22.000It's actually like a time machine because you're, and we were standing across the river, look talking to these people, and it's like, you guys are a couple thousand years back.
02:12:32.000And so it's like, this is such a strange aperture into history.
02:13:10.000It felt like this was like a back to the future moment where it's like, you know, this is, they have no idea.
02:13:15.000And my people, thinking of everyone else back home, I was like, don't realize that these people are still out there in the jungle living like this.
02:13:31.000In fact, while we were watching them out front, there was a terrifying moment where we heard something behind us, and it was, which we never saw them, but the women came lightfoot in behind, and they pulled up all the yucca and the bananas and they were raiding.
02:13:45.000And so for a second, we were like, there's an ambush.
02:13:47.000And everyone was like turning the shotguns away from the river.
02:13:50.000And they were like, we thought there was going to be arrows flying.
02:13:52.000So like, my guy Ignacio grabbed me and like put me down.
02:13:56.000And we were hiding behind trees waiting for it.
02:14:06.000But I really, I really did feel like, you know, like you, you go, imagine what it would be like to go back and see the Comanches, watch them riding across the plains after the buffalo.
02:14:49.000And so, and so, but, but, you know, for all the indigenous cultures that have been destroyed in the last few centuries, we can do it right for once.
02:15:20.000I think it'd be a few more banana exchanges, maybe without the arrow shot afterwards.
02:15:26.000And then maybe it starts to be like, okay, you guys can come here.
02:15:29.000Maybe the communities teach them how to grow bananas.
02:15:32.000Maybe they don't want to come, but they want a few things.
02:15:35.000Maybe they want a couple of machetes because it'll just help.
02:15:38.000And they want to keep to themselves, maybe.
02:15:40.000But I mean, other than them, the thought of the most uncontacted people is North Sentinel Island.
02:15:47.000And North Sentinel Island, the interesting part of that is one of the reasons why they're so distrustful of people is because they had been contacted in the 1800s.
02:15:58.000There was a guy named Commander Maurice Vidal Portman, who was a explorer/slash pervert.
02:16:06.000And the reason why I say that is like this guy had like weird journal logs where he's like, this one has testicles the size of a sparrow's egg.
02:16:15.000Like he would dress them up like Roman soldiers and take pictures of them.
02:16:19.000They kidnapped a few of them and then they gave a bunch of people the flu and a bunch of people died.
02:16:24.000And so they had this immense distrust for people because of this guy and his explorations onto that island.
02:16:32.000That island and other islands like it.
02:16:35.000So they don't have a written language, right?
02:16:37.000These people, there's no evidence they have fire.
02:16:39.000So there's this story of these, because it's an incredibly wet environment.
02:16:44.000So they have these stories that they probably have these oral traditions of these white people that come and fuck up everything.
02:16:52.000So when someone shows up on a boat, like there's been a few instances where people were killed by that missionary a few years back.
02:17:21.000So this is the boat that shipwrecked in 1981.
02:17:27.000A cargo ship named the Primrose ran aground on the coral reef surrounding North Sentinel.
02:17:32.000The crew radioed for assistance and settled for a long wait, but in the morning they saw 50 men with bows on the beach building makeshift boats to swim out to them and fuck them up.
02:17:42.000Yeah, I mean, they have a severe distrust, obviously, of people.
02:17:47.000So I was on the Undaman Islands, which is right next to these.
02:17:50.000That guy, respectable lawyer on Twitter, he's the one I got the information from.
02:17:54.000He documented the whole story of, if you scroll all the way up, he'll talk about that guy, Maurice Vidal Portman.
02:18:39.000You can only, I think if you still like this, you can only get there from the Indian city of Chennai or Calcutta because it's an Indian territory.
02:18:48.000And there's, I mean, they've brought elephants there because they didn't used to have bulldozers and stuff.
02:18:55.000So the British brought elephants by boat, and there's these old archival photos of them lifting off of like pirate ships, lifting elephants on the rigging, and then putting them in the island.
02:19:06.000Now the Andaman Islands have elephants.
02:19:09.000And there's still people riding around on the elephants, you know, like moving trees off the road and doing things.
02:19:14.000But when you go from one place to the other place, exactly what you said, because they don't want human safaris, because they want to protect these indigenous people, you have to go with a police escort to cross the island because you have to go through an event.
02:19:42.000I mean, but this is, you know, elephants moving logs happens all the time, but there's literally a picture of the elephants up on the riggings.
02:22:13.000But everyone's so, I mean, but we haven't actually, when we get to Mars, talk about it all day.
02:22:19.000But it's like until then, I just feel like we are so overwhelmed with serious problems here and the last chance in history to fix those problems.
02:23:36.000What is fascinating to me when people are trying to save things, and by saving things, they don't realize that they're actually fucking things up far worse than saving them.
02:23:47.000I think it's the Mojave Desert, where they just now, California and all their infinite wisdom, decided to build this immense solar farm out in the desert.
02:24:02.000So they decided to build this immense solar farm.
02:24:04.000It turns out this solar farm, because it's got mirrors that point towards these solar panels, it's incinerating 6,000 birds a year, incinerating 6,000 birds a fucking year, which is like, what does that even mean?
02:26:54.000I mean, when you realize there's something that everybody has wrong, or you realize that there's something that the amount, because then you got to get the message to everybody.
02:28:16.000Be the good you want to see in the world.
02:28:17.000Be the good you want to see in the world.
02:28:19.000And it's like I'm in this unique position because I'm contacted now all day long by people that want to help us protect the rainforest, people who want to use that blueprint to do it somewhere else.
02:29:59.000And a lot of them, they're searching for meaning.
02:30:02.000And so they find meaning in activism or in pseudo-activism and yelling about things online.
02:30:11.000And then maybe going out into the street and screaming at people.
02:30:14.000And they think that that gives meaning to their life.
02:30:18.000You know, there's a lot of people that just feel like really lost.
02:30:22.000And this strange concrete culture, concrete and electronic culture that we've created, it doesn't give you the fulfillment that the natural world does.
02:30:32.000I mean, I'm sure it's one of the draws that you have to the jungle is that living out there in nature is wildly fulfilling because it's normal.
02:30:45.000It's like it fills in all the slots that you have evolved to have, like as a human being.
02:30:55.000We've always lived in coordination with nature up until fairly recently.
02:31:00.000You know, if human beings have been alive in this form for half a million years, how long have we been in cities?
02:31:05.000How long have we been in even agriculture?
02:31:28.000So there's a disproportionate amount of severe catastrophic injuries that come out of San Francisco, and their training facility is right outside this power station.
02:32:35.000Because a lot of stories have come out this week about it where people are starting to gather up all the data and they're like, hey, this is not normal.
02:32:43.000This is a much higher percentage of severe injuries from this one camp, which doesn't make any sense.
02:32:49.000Well, it's like that Aaron Brockovich thing, where it's like you find a place where a lot of people are getting the same kind of cancer, and it's like, there's a reason.
02:32:56.000So what does it say here at the top of the article?
02:34:42.000I mean, in environmental college, that was there's numerous giant class action lawsuits for people that were living under high-tension power lines.
02:34:51.000And I mean, I actually knew someone who, I mean, I've been to the places where I did for my senior project I was doing where we went to the areas where they were fracking.
02:35:00.000Remember that documentary where they were lighting the water?
02:35:23.000So we put it into our sponsor, Perplexity.
02:35:25.000There's some limited evidence, a small increase in childhood leukemia risk, very close, high-voltage power lines.
02:35:31.000But overall, the lick is weak, not clearly causal.
02:35:35.000And typically, residential exposures are considered within safety guidelines.
02:35:39.000See, the thing is, it's like, who is one of the things about Perplexity or any large language model is you've got to get the information from online and who's publishing this information.
02:35:51.000So it's like there's only so much of it that's available, but possibly carcinogenic is a weak category.
02:36:01.000So parcel, so it says International Agency for Research and Cancer classifies extremely low frequency magnetic fields like those from power lines as possibly carcinogenic to humans, mainly because of the childhood leukemia data.
02:38:03.000I mean, when you find fossils in the wild, there's nothing like finding fossils.
02:38:07.000I remember the first time I found like a little shell.
02:38:09.000And then, like I said, not that long ago, we found like a seven-foot turtle shell, thick, thick, thick, like black, fossilized in the river basin in the Amazon.
02:38:19.000The river was especially low, and it was just, you know, it was half out, like a crashed alien spaceship.
02:39:34.000A rare occurrence provides researchers with unique information on the structure of the shell.
02:39:38.000In this case, a never-before-seen ooze species, O-O-S-O-O-O species, species of egg named, oh boy, good luck pronouncing that.
02:39:50.000Identified in 22 paper led by paleontologist Quing Hei of Anhui University in China.
02:39:58.000Not only that, it's among the first dinosaur eggs or evidence of any dinosaurs for that matter found in the roughly 70 million year old Upper Cretaceous Christian formation of the Kuishan Basin.
02:40:39.000I'm glad you're out there, and I'm glad you're still alive because you freak me out every now and then when you send me messages that I'm worried about your safety.
02:40:44.000And I need someone to train me to use a gun.
02:41:21.000I never in a million years imagined that I'd get to go on these adventures, see these animals.
02:41:26.000And then now that we're on the cusp of protecting an entire river, I mean, the wildest dreams that me as a kid had couldn't even touch this.